09-20-2022, 07:35 PM
(09-20-2022, 05:38 PM)nguyenivy Wrote:(09-08-2022, 02:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(09-07-2022, 11:36 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(09-05-2022, 08:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (snip)Your so-called gray champion isn't even going to make it through his first term.
I think rather (Biden) is exactly the guy. Biden is a dedicated and capable politician who has a long record of accomplishment. That may not appeal to those who think rebellion consists of not accomplishing anything. For that, Trump is your guy.
His appeal in these speeches is to move us forward, even in spite of the Establishment's resistance. He is saying we CAN accomplish things. Accomplishing things in government is always to challenge the Establishment, because the Establishment wants no change, and no challenge to their ability to fleece the people with low wages, destructive policies and oppression of the working and middle class, and allowing or fostering the growing wealth of the elites to the obscene levels they have reached today. That what Trump offered and delivered to the nation; more of the same of this pampering of elites.
Biden offers instead programs to help the people achieve a prosperous life of some "consequence", despite the efforts of the wealthy economic-libertarian elite to hog all the benefits and opportunities of the last 40 years of Reaganomics, whose success at the ballot box for 40 years had been enhanced by ceaseless appeals to prejudice.
I'm glad we now have our true, truly-gray gray champion!
If he doesn't, then we will have Democrats scrambling for that role. Kamala Harris is the obvious successor.
I expect President Biden to be around at the time of Donald Trump's demise. In view of Trump's bad habits, I am surprised that he is still alive. Should he end up with a long prison term that is the usual consequence of stealing and abusing classified information, then his life or death will mean little because he would die in prison. Trump deserves the effective death that the likes of Aldrich Ames and Andrew Hanssen now endure.
But just as much worth considering: the Skowronek cycle explains clearly why Donald Trump is such a political dud. The political memes that compel so much political change at first (Reagan policies) wear thin over about forty years. The law of diminishing returns applies as much to ideas as to material objects. Reagan's crony-capitalist plutocracy may have been successful in stopping inflation by ensuring that millions of people made contributions to productivity and service while being paid so little that they got priced out of almost anything not a bare necessity, but at some point that becomes terribly ineffective. Trump pushed far harder than Reagan in support of a reactionary agenda that has achieved practically nothing. Pushing harder and getting weak or questionable results is failure, whether political, economic, or cultural.
The Skowronek cycle explains why Jimmy Carter was so ineffective; he sought to revive the New Deal after it had played out. Carter was a good man, a smart man with none of the vices.
This ignores the manifold deficiencies of Donald Trump as a person. We had a President who in many ways shows how to be President, and that is Obama. Obama is an arch-conservative in many ways -- all but his economic agenda. A conservative, pro-business version of Barack Obama is exactly what will be how an effective President from the conservative side will be like. It will not be the vindictive, corrupt, hollow, demagogue that is the disaster that we know as Donald Trump.
We are approaching the end of the 4T and approaching the dawn of a 1T. In a 1T, politics becomes a matter of ensuring that everybody gets something and that everyone makes a contribution.
With that cycle in mind, what should Carter have done? So the New Deal was no longer in demand by the late 1970s/early 1980s. What was? (I am a Millennial who does not remember life before the 1990s.) Was what we wound up getting actually in demand or did it fill a vacuum?
He may have been the wrong person for the time. He needed radical reforms to push America into some new directions, and he was just not the person to do it. Reagan had the audacity to do something very different, and however objectionable it may have been in results it worked to some extent. It had its own seeds of failure. It promoted the idea of people working while being paid a travesty of a living, That was good for ensuring plenty of work in fast-food places and shopping malls where people who still had some money could live the American Dream on the cheap. Millions of others were living a nightmare, and many never escaped it.
Businesses that went into the shopping malls, like Sears, Montgomery-Ward, Mervyn's, Bon-Ton, Radio Shack, Waldenbooks, Music Land/Sam Goody are gone or moribund. K-Mart had its good times; those are now clearly in the past. We have hundreds of disused shopping malls as testaments to a world that could not sustain itself. Cheap labor does not create prosperity, and it never leads to something better unless one gets out of it.
Maybe people had excessively high expectations, with technology continuing to offer new and more lucrative opportunity. High technology of the time was leaving the zone of high profitability and becoming competitive, with shrinking margins of profit. That young late Boom and early X workers were becoming less competent and reliable as shown in the trends of crime, drug use, alcoholism, and lesser academic achievement played a part. Many late Boom and early X youth were unready to make the necessary contributions to prosperity to allow themselves to prosper.
Reagan's solution well fit the 'slacker youth' of the time. It hurt others by treating them like the slacker youth who needed harsh management to keep them from drifting into laziness and by creating a climate that held that every worker was a potential thief.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.